Marxist doctrines, which had appealed to university students and other intellectuals at the end of World War I, had continued to spread despite the militaristic reaction of the thirties. Conservative thought at that time was retreating behind the mystical concept of the “imperial will,” and liberal, democratic thinkers found themselves caught between this obscurantist doctrine and the emerging reality of totalitarian controls. In any case, they never developed a coherent philosophy, and their adherents in the parties, following their usual practice of pragmatic compromise, discredited themselves by temporizing with the military. Only the extreme Left had resisted compromise and had thereby preserved its doctrines intact as an appealing alternative to military dictatorship. When the militarists and emperor-centered conservatives went down in ignominious defeat, the Japanese public assumed that their socialist and communist critics had been right. The American occupation left the intellectual field open to them, and they came to dominate the magazines, newspapers, university faculties, and student bodies. Nikkyoso, the powerful union of primary and secondary school teachers, came largely under the control of the extreme Left. Though the reforms of the occupation and the Japanese institutions these helped to produce were grounded in a liberal, democratic tradition, Japanese thought took on a heavily Marxist flavor.
Japanese Marxism remained much truer in doctrine to the classical Marxism of the nineteenth century than did most postwar derivatives in the rest of the industrialized world, whether in communist, socialist, or so-called capitalist countries. Classical Marxism assumed that, following “feudalism,” there would be a stage of “capitalism,” which was Marx’s analysis of the early period of industrialism in the West. This would be followed by “socialism,” which was his Utopian view of the future. Since capitalism, he claimed, bred imperialism and thus caused war, all international unrest could be laid at its door. That this interpretation failed to explain the unfolding facts of twentieth-century history, particularly in Japan itself, did not seem to lessen the theory’s popularity. Nor did the generally infertile soil for Marxism in Japan, where a very homogeneous society, a fully open educational system, and the economic equalization resulting from the occupation reforms made Japanese feel little sense of “class,” which is absolutely essential to the whole Marxist interpretation.
Ironically, there were deeply ingrained prejudices in Japan against the major so-called socialist countries—the Soviet Union and China—and in favor of the principal so-called capitalist areas—North America and Western Europe. The Japanese feared the Russians more than any other people, and they thought of the Chinese more with condescension and guilt than with real respect. By contrast, there was much admiration for the United States and the democracies of Western Europe. Most Japanese realized how tremendously important friendly relations with the United States were to Japan, and there was also an amazingly strong grassroots respect and affection for America, expressed in the most sincere of all ways—wholesale imitation.
The conflict between the conservatives and progressives took shape only slowly. The occupation was all-powerful and gave stability to what would otherwise have been a very confused situation. Progressives were enthusiastic about the American reforms, and conservatives, who were in control of the Japanese government, approved of many of them and realized the necessity of complying with the others. But, after the so-called reverse course in occupation policies started in 1947 and subsequently authority was increasingly restored to the Japanese government, the political confrontation between Left and Right became clearer and more heated. It also became deeply embroiled with attitudes toward the United States. The progressives increasingly viewed the Americans as enemies, while to the conservatives they came to appear more and more as allies. Almost every political dispute took on anti- and pro-American overtones, and Japanese leftists came to debate with utter seriousness whether it was “American imperialism” or “Japanese monopoly capitalism,” a term used rather loosely to embrace all big business, that was the chief enemy of the Japanese people.
Such attitudes clearly aggravated the “American hangup,” which naturally characterized Japan, as it did so many other countries in the early postwar years when American power so dominated the world. Japan had been almost completely destroyed by Americans and was then occupied and run by them for a number of years. The American presence in Japan was so overwhelming that almost anything someone disliked could be attributed to the United States, and fears that Japan might lose its national identity could reasonably be blamed on pernicious “Americanization.” All Occidentals in Japan were assumed to be Americans, unless there was clear proof to the contrary, and children quite simply called all of them Americans rather than gaijin, or “outsiders,” the usual somewhat pejorative postwar term for Westerners. With Americans and their policies so much on Japanese minds, an already deep cleavage within Japanese politics was further exacerbated by a dangerous divergence of views on relations with the United States, which came to be the focus of most political conflict.
Despite the years of military domination and war, it soon became obvious that many political trends of the twenties had survived reasonably unchanged. Soon after the surrender, all the prewar parties sprang back to life, reemerging from the dead shell of the Imperial Rule Assistance Association. In early November 1945, only two months after the start of the occupation, the Minseito was reborn as the Progressive party (Shinpoto) and chose as its president Shidehara, the liberal foreign minister of the twenties. On October 9 Shidehara had become prime minister in place of the imperial prince chosen to ensure the surrender of the armed forces. The Seiyukai reappeared under its nineteenth-century name of Liberal party (Jiyuto). The former Social Mass party made a fresh start under the less ambiguous name of Socialist party (Shakaito). Even the Communist party (Kyosanto), which had not been a legal entity since 1924, was reborn on December 1. It was organized by old leaders who had been freed from prison and were soon joined by other old leaders returning to Japan after long periods of refuge with the Chinese Communists.
Despite the revival of the old parties, however, the political situation was quite confused, as was revealed by the first postwar election on April 10, 1946. More than a third of the vote for members of the lower house of the Diet went to independents and some sixty minor new parties. Still, the traditional parties did quite well. The Socialists almost doubled their 1937 share of the vote from 9.1 to 17.8 percent. The Communists, despite great publicity, won only 3.8 percent. The remaining 43 percent went to the Liberals and Progressives, far less than their combined 71 percent in 1937, but still an impressive demonstration of political continuity. This was all the more remarkable since most of their former Dietmen had been purged as members of the Imperial Rule Assistance Association. The Liberal party won a plurality in the House of Representatives, with 140 of the 466 seats. Since its reconstitution its leader had been an old politician, Hatoyama Ichiro, but the occupation purged him on the eve of the election. His successor, Yoshida Shigeru, a former foreign ministry bureaucrat and ambassador to London who had escaped the purge because of a clearly antiwar stand, became prime minister on May 22 and served in this post for seven of the next eight and a half years.
UPI
The emperor opening the Diet with a brief message on November 27, 1945.
Yoshida typified certain characteristics of the politics of the times. He was one of many former bureaucrats who, seeing the new locus of political power, joined the parties and ran for election to the Diet. Such former bureaucrats were often the cream of the Japanese educational system and had had broad experience in governmental matters. As a result, they often dominated the conservative parties, and they occupied the prime ministership for all but three of the first twenty-seven postwar years. Yoshida’s position illustrated the Japanese government’s peculiar status as executor of the policies of the American occupation. The most important function of his government was to deal with the Americans and try to inf
luence them. To accomplish this task, a good knowledge of English was useful, and it is no accident that Shidehara, Yoshida, and Ashida Hitoshi, another one of the four prime ministers under the occupation, were all products of the foreign ministry. The government’s peculiar relationship with the occupation also meant that Yoshida, even when backed by only a minority in the Diet, could with occupation support run things in a more heavy-handed manner than proved feasible after the occupation ended. He was the only strong political leader to emerge in postwar Japan and was given by his countrymen the English sobriquet of “one-man” Yoshida.
In April 1947 a series of elections was held to prepare for the inauguration of the new constitution the next month. The prewar tendency to avoid party labels in local elections reasserted itself, and virtually two-thirds of the forty-six prefectural governors, more than two-thirds of the city mayors, and nine-tenths of the town and village mayors were elected as independents. Even in the first election for the House of Councillors, close to half the members elected were also independents. At the same time, the overwhelming majority of all these independents were clearly conservatives, close to the policies of the traditional parties in their political views and often intimately allied with them. What had been the emerging mainstream of Japanese politics in the twenties had, after a decade and a half of violent disruption, asserted itself once again, almost as strong as ever.
The second postwar general election for the lower house on April 25, 1947, revealed a considerable shakedown of the political situation. One new political group, the Cooperative party (Kyodoto), won 7 percent of the vote, but the other minor parties and independents dropped to a mere 11 percent of the total. The Communist vote stayed almost constant, and the remaining 78 percent was divided almost equally among the three major parties, the Socialists, the Liberals, and the Democrats (Minshuto), as the Progressive party had renamed itself.
The election also illustrated another significant point. In prewar elections the party in power, being able to distribute rewards, usually gained seats. The Liberals, though ostensibly “in power,” were not in a position to provide such rewards under the occupation, and they had to accept criticism directed against occupation policies. They lost 9 seats, and the Socialists, though a hairline below the Liberals in popular votes, emerged as the plurality party with 143 seats. On May 24 they formed a coalition cabinet with the Democratic and the Cooperative parties, under the leadership of the veteran Christian Socialist, Katayama Tetsu.
The Socialist-led government was a strange amalgam of diverse forces, and the Socialists in any case were in no position to carry out a socialistic policy. Indeed, it was they who were now vulnerable to criticism directed against occupation policies. Old prewar divisions within the Socialist movement reasserted themselves, and Katayama, in the face of a revolt of the left wing of his own party, resigned and was succeeded on March 10, 1948, by the former diplomat Ashida, the head of the Democratic party, as the leader of a coalition cabinet made up of the same three parties. This second coalition had an even less happy history; Ashida was forced to resign only seven months later by the defection of the Socialists, amid widespread charges of corruption.
Yoshida returned as prime minister on October 15, 1948, again with only minority support in the Diet, but he dissolved the lower house and held a general election on January 23, 1949. The Democratic, Socialist, and Cooperative parties were all seriously discredited in the eyes of the public as having been the instruments of the occupation in the two preceding cabinets, and as a result their popular vote fell drastically. On the other hand, the Communists more than doubled their vote to 9.7 percent, and the Liberals, with about 44 percent of the vote, won 264 seats, the first one-party majority in the postwar Diet. Yoshida and his cabinet of Liberals vigorously continued on through the rest of the occupation period and thus headed the Japanese government in power at the time the peace treaty went into effect.
The peace treaty came none too soon. In the course of 1951 the purge had been lifted on many categories and was completely abandoned when the peace treaty went into effect on April 28, 1952, but the increasing irritation of the Japanese public with American domination showed itself a few days later on May Day, the great leftist holiday, when there was widespread rioting and damage to American property. With Japan finally out from under the occupation, the time had come for new elections, which Yoshida held on October 1, 1952. His Liberals increased their popular support a little, though poorer distribution of the vote resulted in a loss of seats to 240, still a clear majority.
The Progressives, as they once again were called, had absorbed the Cooperative party after the last election and showed some recovery from their 1949 electoral disaster, but the parties of the Left were in serious trouble. During the summer of 1949 the Communists had been discredited by several acts of violence generally attributed to them. Ever since the war, the Japanese public has reacted sharply against any violence that took human lives. The Communists fell into even worse difficulties after Moscow openly censured them in January 1950 for their realistic but soft line, according to which they even tolerated the imperial institution and called for a “lovable Communist party.” The subsequent return to hard-line attitudes and activities lost them support and led to a suppression of their newspaper and a purge of their leaders by the occupation. For the most part the Communist leaders went underground, and the decline of the party became evident when it won only 2.6 percent of the vote and not a single seat in 1952. Many voters who had deserted the Socialists for the Communists in 1949 returned at this time to the Socialist column.
The Socialists, however, had their problems too. Ideological divisions revived from prewar days had helped wreck the Katayama cabinet, and disagreement over the peace treaty produced a complete split of the party into left- and right-wing factions in October 1951, with the left wing refusing to support the peace treaty because of the exclusion of the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China. The two wings of the party entered the 1952 election with separate slates, and though together they won 21 percent of the vote and 111 seats, with the right wing in a slight lead over its rival, they undoubtedly did less well than if they had been unified.
Behind the split in the Socialist party was an equally sharp division among the labor unions. Since these provided the bulk of the grassroots organization for the party, about half its Diet membership, and a large part of its vote, they exercised a disproportionately large influence on party decisions. From the early days of the occupation there had been violent struggles between the Communists and Socialists for control of the labor movement. The Communists, better organized and disciplined, were skillful at winning control over unions, but there were repeated rank-and-file “anti-Communist” or “democratization” movements that brought most unions back under Socialist leadership.
Even the Socialist-controlled unions, however, began to divide into two types. Those of blue collar workers in private industry increasingly emphasized strikes and bargaining aimed at increasing their own wages, while unions of white collar workers and government employees remained focused on direct political action against the government and on global issues. Unions mostly of this second type formed a national federation called Sohyo, which had started in 1950 as an “anti-Communist” movement, and this became the main labor group supporting the left wing of the Socialist party. A considerably smaller grouping, made up largely of the more moderate, economically oriented, blue collar unions, became the chief support of the right wing. In 1954 it took the name Zenro, which was changed to Domei in the early sixties. Some unions remained under Communist control, and many others chose to be independent of national organizations or joined a loose grouping of “neutrals,” but the two most politically significant labor federations were Sohyo, with about 4.5 million members, and Domei, which was close to half that size.
The conservative parties, too, though in firm political control, had their problems of unity. They had always b
een basically clubs of Diet members grouped together for more effective action in the legislature, but the grassroots organizations of the parties themselves were weak, as the overwhelming success of independents in local elections indicated. The real foundations for the conservative parties consisted of the personal local power bases (jiban) of the individual Dietmen and their personal support organizations (koenkai), which they increasingly developed on a broader geographic scale after the war. The essential ingredient for both types of organization was the support of local politicians and interest groups, which centered around local rather than national issues. The conservative parliamentarian was thus more the product of his own local political connections, as in the United States, than the product of a centrally controlled national party, as in England. This independence of the Dietman from the national party was heightened by the peculiar electoral system adopted in 1925, in which three to five persons were elected from a single electoral district, thus putting candidates from the same party into more serious electoral competition with one another than with candidates from other parties. A Dietman’s chief political rivals in elections were other members of his own party, just as they were his chief rivals, when the party was in power, for appointment to such high government posts as cabinet ministers, committee chairmen in the Diet, or strategic positions in the national party organization.
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